The Rose Garden (30 page)

“Oh, Ellen,” she said, “you gave me a fright. What time is it? Put on the light. Why didn't you wake me? Is your father in?”

“He's in the dining room, Mammy,” Ellen said. “He only just came in. He's reading the paper. And Mammy, the poor man fell asleep in the kitchen and he's still there.”

“The poor man—the poor man that wanted the boots. Oh, Ellen, Ellen, why didn't you wake me? What possessed you to let me sleep on? Oh, what'll I do now?”

She got stiffly off the bed and put her hands up to her hair, which was straggling after her heavy sleep.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Oh dear, dear, dear.”

There was still a red glow in the fireplace, and she went across and poked it up and put on a shovel of coal.

“Don't you get out of bed,” she said to Johanna, who watched her sleepily. “And Ellen, you go on downstairs and keep your father company. And keep the door to the hall shut.”

When Ellen went back to the back sitting room, her father was spreading his paper over the table to dry it.

“The news is wet tonight, Ellen,” he said. “It's a rotten old paper anyway. I wonder why I buy it. Now, where are the cards? We'll have a game of old maid before tea.”

As her father was shuffling the cards, Ellen heard a sound in the hall. She knew what had happened. The man had stumbled against the top of the three steps up from the kitchen. The father heard him, too, and he got up.

“Don't tell me she's carrying the tea up here?” he said. “And me with the old paper all over the table.”

He opened the door. The mother stood against the banisters,
looking at them. The man stood beside her, caught in flight, and his face wore the artful, afflicted smile that Ellen recognized from seeing it on her mother's face. He was afraid. The father walked past the man and along the hall and opened the front door and the man followed him. As the man was going past him the father said, “Have you a place to go for the night?” and then he put his hand in his waistcoat pocket and gave the man something—sixpence or a shilling, maybe both. “Good night, good night, good luck,” he said, and shut the door, and came back down the hall and into the dining room and sat down again in his chair by the gas fire. They all went in after him.

The mother said, “I'm sorry, John.”

The father looked up at her.

“It isn't that I mind the cups of tea and all the rest of it,” he said. “It isn't that I mind the way every man, woman, and child that comes near the place can get around you. What I mind is hiding down there in the kitchen and teaching the children to tell me lies. That's what I mind. And I won't have it. Do you hear me? I won't have it.”

“I was only afraid you'd be angry,” the mother said.

“You're always being afraid,” the father said. “That's all I hear—that you're afraid. What's there to be afraid of? What's wrong with you? And you're making Ellen the same way.”

“Oh, leave Ellen out of it,” the mother whispered.

“How did he get here, that's what I'd like to know,” the father said. “What brings them all to this house? Not content with opening the door and giving them money I can't spare, you have to invite them to come in and sit down and make themselves at home. What's the matter with you?”

“He only wanted to know if I had a pair of old boots,” the mother said.

Bridget turned from watching her mother's face and looked at her father's shoes. Ellen also looked at them, and the father looked
down at them.

“I'm wearing them out as fast as I can,” he said, and he began to laugh. Then he stopped laughing and he put his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. Bridget tried to do the same thing, although she was standing up.

“Would you like your tea on a tray by the fire here?” the mother asked.

“All right,” he said.

The mother brought a tray to her husband, and Ellen carried a tray up to Johanna, who was sitting up in bed with her crayons and a picture book.

“There was an awful row,” Ellen said. “And Mammy is crying in the kitchen and she won't have any tea.”

“Oh, she's always crying,” Johanna said.

The back bedroom held two narrow beds for Ellen and Johanna and a high-sided iron cot, painted white, that Bridget still slept in. They always left one side of the cot down so that Bridget would know she wasn't really a baby any longer. Halfway up the stairs, in the boxroom, the father had a gramophone and a set of French Linguaphone records, and a set of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
that he was buying in installments from a man who came selling it at the door. There was a lumpy little bed in the room, a spare bed. Later in the evening, as she was going upstairs to bed, Ellen heard a French voice talking in there, a man's voice. That meant her father was sitting in there alone, sitting on the edge of the bed, listening to the gramophone, learning French. He often went in there to have an hour to himself after tea, or on a Sunday afternoon. Sometimes after tea he went to see a play in town, but the mother never went with him, because she had the children to mind. He said that when Ellen was bigger she could go with him. He liked to go for long walks in the Dublin hills on Saturdays
and Sundays in the good weather, and in the summertime he often went to Wicklow and had a few days by himself. He said that when Ellen's legs were longer she could go on the walks with him, too. Sometimes in the summer holidays the father took them all to Killiney or Greystones for the day, but the strand was always crowded, and one or another of them generally lost something in the soft sand. Ellen had lost her First Communion medal and the chain that held it around her neck. The father liked to go swimming, and he used to dip the children in and out of the water and then carry them back on his wet sharp shoulders to the mother, who would dry them under a very big towel that would keep the other people from seeing them when she stripped their bathing dresses off.

The window of the little boxroom looked out over the roof of the shed where they kept the coal and the firewood and the empty boxes where the stray cats made their beds on nights like tonight. The roof of the shed was of corrugated tin, and Ellen thought that when her father had finished listening to the record he would hear the great drumming the rain made when it hit the tin, and she wished she could hear that sound from her own bed.

Ellen did not know how long she had been asleep that night when she woke to find her mother fitting herself into the bed beside her.

“Oh, Ellen, don't wake up,” the mother said. “I'm perishing with the cold and you're as warm as a little bull always. I'll just get warm. I'll just lie here a minute.”

Ellen moved quickly over and made room, and she and her mother lay squeezed together. The mother turned on her side and her long plait fell across Ellen's face. Ellen put her arm out into the night and lifted the plait gently and laid it across the top of the pillow. The mother made a little sound and settled more deeply into the warmth of the bed. Ellen put her arm out again, and put
her hand timidly against her mother's face. She felt her mother's hard forehead, her eyelids, her cheek, her pointed nose, and at last her mouth.

“What is it, Ellen?” the mother asked.

“I was afraid you were crying,” Ellen said.

The mother took Ellen's hand and put it back under the covers. She was very careful, as though it were not Ellen's hand at all but a small creature she had found lost and was putting back into its nest.

“Ellen,” she said, “I was only cold.”

“Now you won't be cold anymore,” Ellen said.

“I'm getting lovely and warm now,” the mother said. “Only my feet, and they'll soon warm up.”

They slept. When Ellen woke again it was still dark, not yet time to get up. She felt comfortable and safe. Her mother had said she was as warm as a little bull. Other times her mother had said that Ellen was strong as a little horse, good as gold, bold as brass, growing too fast, growing out of her clothes, getting bigger every time you looked at her.

Around the house the rain fell contentedly without interruption. The rain had all the time in the world. Ellen thought that the poor man would surely come back, and she hoped that when he came back she would be by herself in the house. Her father would be off out somewhere and her mother would be out, too. And Bridget and Johanna would not be there. She would open the door to him and bring him down to the kitchen and give him something to eat. She would turn her back so that he would know she was not looking at him when he was eating or looking at his food. She wouldn't ask him any questions or bother him with talking to him, and she wouldn't tell him she had heard him talking in his sleep, and after a while he would get used to her and he would begin to talk of his own accord and he wouldn't be afraid anymore.

The Daughters

A
t eleven-thirty in the morning, a weekday morning, a nervous lady of about forty sat alone on a love seat in the lobby of a little hotel on lower Fifth Avenue and waited for her father to escort her to lunch. The lobby was square and paneled and furnished in chintz, and would have been really cozy if it had not been for the large, walled recess in which the upper half of a clerk was always visible, and the cashier's cage, with its hand-sized aperture for the placing of money, and the two elevators with their uniformed attendants, and the brilliantly lighted glass doors—a wide one leading to the restaurant, and a narrow, pursed one to the bar. The lady on the love seat, Miss Lister, was one of the hotel's permanent guests. As she watched the elevators she fidgeted, with her gloves, and with the collar of her navy-blue coat, and with the modest silver pin at her throat, and once or twice she put up her hand and touched the maroon sailor that sat like an offering on her neat brown hair.

The older of the elevator attendants stepped into his car and closed the doors, answering a summons from above. Miss Lister stopped fidgeting.

Two or three minutes later, the elevator doors opened. Miss
Lister sighed. The people emerging from the car were strangers to her. First came a blooming, buxom lady, dressed in a cashmere sweater, a sporty plaid skirt, and two ropes of pink pearls. By her side an old man tottered. She held his elbow as though it were a handle while his feeble shoes sought the door industriously. A magenta-haired lady in a mink stole followed them from the elevator and skipped to catch up with them. “Isn't he wonderful?” she exclaimed as they all three came toward Miss Lister. “Isn't he remarkable? My, oh, my! There's the chair, now. There's the chair. Easy does it, now. There!”

As the old man dropped into an easy chair beside the love seat, his knees shot up, his feet came together, and he appeared to be locked into position. At the same moment, the buxom lady, who was now flushed the same deep pink as her pearls, plumped violently onto the love seat, causing Miss Lister to bounce. The newcomer delivered, sidewise, a dazzling smile of apology, disclosing a full set of strong white teeth. She had a splendid complexion—the complexion of a physical-education teacher who has just walked off the hockey field after a brisk game in bracing winter weather. The large pale hand with which she patted her honey-colored permanent was festooned with three ornate, thickly clustered diamond rings.

“He's really ninety-three?” the magenta-haired lady said, bending graciously from her hips, which were sheathed in black silk bouclé. “Imagine! Ninety-three years old!”